Thoughts on literature and myth

Main menu

Monthly Archives: June 2017

Post navigation

“I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I had already told you.

That, by the way, was the way I was trained.“

– S. S. Captain Josef Kramer, about the gassing of eighty Jews at Auschwitz; as quoted in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer

A Muslim teenager was lynched on a train India on 23rd June. Apparently, a group of people attacked four Muslims, accusing them of being beef eaters, and mercilessly beat them up. Later on, sixteen-year-old Junaid died of his injuries. News reports say that the amount of blood in the train shows the enormity of the gruesome violence.

While I was distressed by the news (my son sixteen, dammit!), I must sadly say that I was not surprised or shocked. Gratuitous violence towards Muslims has become the new normal in India. One glances at the headlines, registers the fact, and moves ahead – and another death becomes a statistic (except for the family of the person murdered, that is).

Why is it so? How can people accept (if not condone) such atrocities as part of the daily grind?

Maybe, the answer can be found in Hitler’s short-lived Third Reich – its ‘philosophy’ and application.

Over a period of six months from December 2016 to May 2017, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer’s definitive account of the Third Reich under the evil and mad genius, the warlord Hitler. Hitler expected that the Reich will last for a thousand years – in reality, it lasted just over 12 years. In those twelve, the Fuehrer managed to create hell on earth for the people whom he ruled over as well as in those areas which he conquered; the war he initiated managed to destroy 50 to 80 million people all over the world.

Nowadays we wonder – how did such a lunatic from the fringe enter mainstream politics, and even without any sort of a proper majority, manage to take over the country and win the support of the majority of the German populace for his unspeakably evil schemes? Do we have to accept there is some basic flaw in the German character that makes them susceptible to this sort of brainwashing? Or is it historic, something to do with the virulent anti-Semitism of the West? Was it a unique phenomenon which, after having happened once in history, will never happen again?

To the first two questions, I would agree partially: to the last, however, I would have to say no to the last. It can happen again, and in fact, is happening all over the world.

Humanity in general, and not only Germans, is always susceptible to projection. A race proud of its antecedents, lately fallen on bad times in their own estimation, looks for a scapegoat to apportion blame. In Weimar Germany, the victim the inheritors of the mythical Aryan race found was, not unsurprisingly, the Jew: the killers of Christ, the legendary hawkish money-lender, Fagin who inducts young children into a life of crime…

If we study how anti-Semitism developed side-by-side along with the legend of the Aryan race who colonised and “civilised” the known world, we will definitely find the race superiority complex of the European masquerading as “philosophy” and “history”. The Jew has been cast in the role of the villain who apparently spoilt the purity of the European race, descendants of the Aryans who had a pristinely pure monotheistic religion. This theory, which gained traction during enlightenment, was further developed into the concept of the ubermensch by Nietzsche and later developed into Nazism (as explained by Dorothy M. Figueira in her fascinating book Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity).

India, taking nourishment from the same mythical root, found a different enemy to blame for their fall from grace – the Muslim. The myth of the Middle Eastern marauder, running amok over the temples and ashrams of India, killing Hindu priests and kidnapping and raping Hindu girls slowly became an accepted fact in the Hindu cultural milieu, half-truth though it was; the British who wanted to divide the country along religious lines also promoted this myth so that a permanent fault line (which created the partition in 1947) was created. This fault line has been growing wider ever since, and now we are seeing a country on the verge of fracture.

As the resentment grows, so does the intolerance – and the indifference to violence against the minorities. It does not happen on one fine day (as they are fond of saying, it did not start with the gas chambers). It requires years of patient propaganda, the feeding of the latent hatred by a dedicated ideological group.

Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 119-2406-01 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Shirer writes:

No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

(Shirer is writing here about Nazi Germany – but as far as I can see in democratic India in the 21st Century, the same applies for any right-winger: and I suspect that it may be applicable globally. They have come to a stage where they cannot differentiate between fact and fantasy. They live in a fantasy world created in their minds, where facts are what they want them to be. So in a way, Kellyanne Conway is right; there are “alternative facts”, even though us ordinary mortals cannot see them.)

Thus, we move towards the practice of evil as a daily affair – an incredibly banal one, as Hannah Arendt would say. Hence the quote at the beginning of this post – just a soldier doing his job.

I believe – in fact, I am terrified – that India has progressed on this path to fascism at a frightening speed in the past three years. Modi and the BJP government are certainly to blame, but they are only the symptoms. The cancer goes much deeper. Sadly, we see the same happening in many democracies – USA, Turkey etc. Unless we identify the root of the evil in our own mind and cast it out, we may end up with another Hitlerian era, which will be much more dangerous in the current world.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

During my “Pre-Degree” days in college (that’s grades XI and XII in these days, folks) we had something called a “non-detailed” text in English. It was either a novel or a story collection which we were supposed to study and provide book reports (maybe that’s where my love of reviewing started). It was in such a collection that I met Frank O’Connor, through his beautiful story My Oedipus Complex – and I loved it.

However in those days interests were varied and there were much more exciting stuff out there; so I forgot all about him until a few days back, this title caught my eye at a garage sale. I immediately picked it up. It did not contain that beautiful story, alas – but it more than made up for it through ten excellent stories, each one better than the other so I’d be hard put to choose a favourite.

O’Connor writes with a disarming candour and a dry wit which stops just short of full blown sarcasm; he is too sympathetic towards his characters for that. However, he can’t help but note their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities – and that of mankind in general – so that he cannot ever take them seriously (or himself, for that matter). The result is an extremely readable set of stories which analyse profound philosophical conundrums as though they were the subject of the idle talk in an Irish pub.

The three themes that run through Irish literature, I’ve found, are: the breakdown of homes (due to absent or wastrel fathers), the abject poverty of most of the populace and a puritanical Catholicism, shot through with constant guilt of sin and the exceeding urge to commit it. This is evident in the title story about two girls, Polly Donegan and Nora Lawlor, and Charlie Cashman who falls for Nora but when snubbed by her, marries Polly. Their union is less than ideal, however, as Polly is not inclined to enjoy sex: that, coupled with the fact that she does not conceive and Charlie’s increasing need to prove himself as a man leads to an illicit liaison, scandal, and the untimely death of his wife. To compound matters, there is his mother who hates him and actively wishes that he dies intestate so that the shop he inherited from his father will go to his brother’s children after death. It has all the trappings for a dark and brooding tale – but in O’Connor’s hands it becomes so lighthearted that I actually chuckled in a couple of places! Evidently, the world is a comedy to those who think.

But not all stories in this collection are so pleasant, mind you. Four of the stories are written from a child’s point of view (something which O’Connor does very well, as evidenced in My Oedipus Complex) and all of them are pretty dark: especially Christmas Morning which details the sudden loss of childhood and Babes in the Wood which shows us the utter despair of abandonment. Of course, to balance the scale, there are comic gems like News for the Church and The House that Johnny Built.

I conclude the review with two samples, one tragic and one comic, to show the power of O’Connor’s prose.

From Christmas Morning:

I understood it all, and it was almost more than I could bear; that there was no Santa Claus, as the Dohertys said, only Mother trying to scrape together a few coppers from the housekeeping; that Father was mean and common and a drunkard, and she had been relying on me to raise her out of the misery of the life she was leading. And I knew that the look in her eyes was the fear that, like my father, I should turn out to be mean and common and a drunkard.

From The House that Johnny Built:

…He had a red face, an apoplectic face which looked like a plum pudding you’d squeezed up and down till it bulged sideways, so that the features were all flattened and spread out and the two eyes narrowed into slits. As if that was not enough he looked at you from undr the peak of his cap as though you were the headlights of a car, his right eye cocked, his left screwed up, till his whole face wrinkled as a roasted apple.